An Empirical Study On The Application Of Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In Extensive Reading Lessons Of Senior High Schools

The researches on vocabulary learning of a second language havebeen spotlighted by many experts abroad since1970s，with the aim tosearch for a new pathway for vocabulary acquisition. One of the mostnoted theories among those was―Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition‖,widely recognized and stressed as the theoretical support for latervocabulary learning to the universal extent. However, the domesticresearch on this field has just started, thus how to apply this theory intopractical use is the key to reforming our country’s vocabulary teaching. Inthis thesis, the author attempts to conduct an empirical study by applyingIVA into English extensive reading lessons of senior middle school. Fivedifferent reading tasks have been compared and analyzed in view of theircorresponding effect on IVA. Furthermore, an important conclusion hasbeen drawn, contributing to assisting students to acquire and maintainvocabulary as well as providing English teachers with some effectivesuggestions. The experiment in this paper is designed to answer thefollowing three questions:1) Do the reading tasks diversely designed havedifferent effects on IVA for senior high school students?2) If they do, whatkind of reading tasks favor the development of IVA, as measured by animmediate-test in the experiment?3) Which reading tasks contribute to thevocabulary knowledge retained in memory through the evaluation of thedelayed post-test?50students from senior Grade2, No.1Middle School of Huhhotparticipated in the experiment over the duration of three months, who wererespectively divided into five groups: single-gloss reading group,multiple-choice gloss reading group, blanks-filling group, sentence-makinggroup and retelling group. With the reference to theories of InvolvementLoad Hypothesis, Schema theory, and Cumulative Vocabulary Acquisition etc as the theoretical guidance, tests with various forms were adopted toaccomplish this research, after which the effect of reading tasks onstudents’ IVA was analyzed with the experimental data collected. Besides,SPSS19.0was employed to analyze the test scores. Conclusions are asfollows:1) Different reading tasks have a diverse effect on IVA for high schoolstudents, but only with effective ones can students acquire and maintainwords ideally.2)The groups performing retelling, blanks-filling, and multiple-choicegloss reading have relatively more advantages of acquiring and keepingvocabulary over other reading tasks. Their common characteristics wereanalyzed to reveal that the reading task with a certain involvement load canbring about IVA on condition of reviewing lexical semantics and usagesabove, thus forming the conscious memorizing of vocabulary. In addition,learners go through the process of deep processing and cognitiveprocessing. Students’ language ability can surely be enhanced from thecomprehensible language input to output.3) The sentence-making task ran counter to the theory of InvolvementLoad Hypothesis, which indicates that tasks with higher involvement loadfunctions better than the lower ones. Nevertheless, this task is inferior toother groups’ scores whether from the vocabulary acquisition or its’retention of memory. Therefore, the lever of depth should be quantified andother factors apart from involvement load are supposed to be taken intoaccount in the specific teaching for every teacher.